


Nocturne

by suggsygirl



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Angst, M/M, Nightmares, Slash, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-06
Updated: 2013-08-06
Packaged: 2017-12-22 15:39:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 549
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/914973
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/suggsygirl/pseuds/suggsygirl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John wakes from a nightmare and thinks about his life...</p>
            </blockquote>





	Nocturne

**Author's Note:**

> A big thank you to marginaliana for the beta.

John awoke with a start to a night that was suffocating in its intensity; the air was thick and pressed down on him like it might squeeze the oxygen right back out of his lungs. He gasped, he sweated, he prayed to a deity he had never believed in to begin with. 

Slowly the oppressive air lifted and he was merely terrified, no longer both terrified and convinced he might die. That was an improvement of sorts and yet he couldn’t slow the path of the tears that rolled down his cheeks to plop in fat drops on his duvet, turning the material darker and darker. 

He was used to the nightmares, used to them in the way that prison inmates grew used to the bars, accepting and yet wishing fervently that they weren’t there, wishing they had never been there at all.

At least he wasn’t dead though, however much he might sometimes wish that he was. 

Before he met Sherlock he hadn’t killed himself. He had thought about it obsessively; he had planned, he had catalogued his acquaintances’ expressions as they stood at his funeral. Acquaintances and not friends because John didn’t really have friends. He had people he was friendly with, he had people he wore a mask for, people he drank with and laughed with and not one of them knew what he was hiding inside.

Sherlock knew him, in fact Sherlock knew him only too well; knew the bits he wanted to show and the bits he didn’t, knew all his dirty little secrets and cared not one jot for any of them, which was really the crux of the problem if John were completely honest with himself.

Sherlock did care, John knew that; he was not a sociopath no matter how much he enjoyed saying he was. However there was caring and then there was the feeling inside John’s chest, like he might just explode at any moment from the strain of keeping it inside.

It wasn’t about sex. John would have coped immeasurably better had it merely been about the joining of bodies, about the slick slide of heated skin. No, it was about the broken depths of him. It was about the _need_ in him that Sherlock, somehow, without even trying, had just filled right to the brim.

That wasn’t to say that he didn’t want to have sex with Sherlock - deep in the dead of night he could admit to himself that he did. That he wanted and even longed for Sherlock’s touch, for his touch freely given. That wasn’t the point, though - sex wasn’t the point, sex wasn’t the thing that frightened him in the middle of the night. No, that honour belonged to the emotion curled deep down in his belly, to the nameless thing he was not calling love.

John only wrestled with these things late at night, when the nightmares had worn his defenses down and he didn’t have the strength to stop the thoughts rushing in and making their home in his psyche. During the day there was tea and chatter and a million and one mundane thoughts rattling around in his brain. At night, though, he was stripped bare, and there was only Sherlock, Sherlock and his nightmares to fill the oppressive, endless darkness.


End file.
